Most online presentation apps try to imitate the look-and-feel of PowerPoint with varying degrees of success. Last week, I was pointed toward one online app trying to do things differently … by imitating the look of Apple's Keynote. Here's a look at what to expect in using 280 Slides.


a very Leopard-like interface

Because 280 Slides takes a lot of cues from Keynote, the interface is very subdued and unobtrusive. I personally prefer interfaces that try to stay out of my way while I'm working, so I can appreciate what they've done here.

Finally, while you can begin using 280 Slides with no registration, you do have to set up an account in order to save images and presentations. With that noted, let's get started.

Assembling a Presentation

Starting a new presentation opens up a theme chooser. There's nothing too exciting here, but Sagan is nice to look at. A couple of the other themes, like Sky, City, and Pink, look like they could be pretty visually distracting. In terms of slide layouts, there are currently only three: blank, title-and-content, and title slide. Fortunately, because objects and text can be easily arranged on the slide, these layouts don't limit possibilities.


the theme chooser

Adding text behaves just like Keynote. You can either double-click in a provided space or click the text icon in the toolbar to create a new text-box. The text creation tools are pretty sparse, but the selection of fonts is decent, including Hoefler Text, American Typewriter, Gill Sans, and Century Gothic among the selections. There's no support for Text Art, but that's probably a good thing.

Adding shapes, movies, and images is as simple as clicking the appropriate toolbar icon, and all three are managed from a single media pane. Shapes can be inserted through drag-and-drop, or you can double-click a shape to insert it. The Pictures tab searches Flickr and Google Images for results, and the Movies tab searches YouTube and Vimeo. You may also upload and store pictures in your own image library. It's worth noting that I ran into a couple of hang-ups in uploading images. I had no problems inserting a YouTube video.


the all-purpose media browser

It's also possible to enter an image URL to insert it into your slide, and this worked flawlessly. However, the inserted image was significantly larger than my slide, and I had to manually resize the image for it to fit – no automatic resizing like in Keynote. Additional omissions in image tools include the ability to crop pictures as well as add borders or shadows. It is very easy to alter any object's opacity with a slider in the Formatting Bar, and the opacity scales very smoothly.

Worth special mention is 280 Slides' color panel. While the first two tabs are the standard wheel and sliders, the third tab integrates with Adobe's Kuler service, allowing you to search for color schemes or browse popular ones. Any colors you find and like can be saved to a row of color swatches in the panel. You can save up to nine swatches.


selecting and saving colors

Finally, if you are looking for any build animations or slide transitions, look elsewhere. 280 Slides does not support animations at this time.

Sharing Your Creations

There are three buttons on the far right of the toolbar that allow you to share your slides: Present, Download, and Share.



Present fills the browser window with your slides, and you can click through them as you would a traditional PowerPoint presentation. The B key even works as expected. Unfortunately, the browser chrome is still visible, but if you use a windowless browser like Plainview, the display will be indistinguishable from any other presentation application.

The Download button will automatically place a .pptx file in your Downloads stack (or wherever you save downloaded files) that PowerPoint 2007/2008 can open and edit. I could not test this file since I do not have Office 2008 yet. With that in mind, since 280 Slides' output is so simple, it would be nice to be able to download the slides as a .pdf file or as a folder of images.

Finally, selecting Share allows you to email a PowerPoint file to someone, send your presentation to SlideShare (which is cool), or generate a direct link to your presentation for others to view from within their own browsers.

Other Random Observations

• The application does support scroll wheels and double-clicking in most interface elements with the exception of the theme and layout choosers. Double-clicking a theme or a layout will not apply it to your presentation/slide.
• Clicking and dragging to select multiple objects on a slide does not work. However, cmd-clicking and shift-clicking does.
• Double-clicking an object doesn't insert text like in Keynote.
• While inserted objects and images can be freely rotated, this is not true of text boxes.
• 280 Slides supports common keyboard commands such as cmd-s, cmd-c, cmd-v, and cmd-z.

Conclusions

Like Google Presentations and other online apps, 280 Slides is unlikely to supplant your usual tools. However, it is handy to have an "in-the-clouds" location to access your presentations at any time. Unfortunately, you can't upload a .ppt file to 280 Slides like you can to Google's service, and this probably limits the appeal. From a purely user-interface point of view, 280 Slides trumps anything I've used so far, but the features are too light to make a convert of me right now. I recommend you give the service a try for yourself, and submit feedback while you are at it. I'm sure more features and functionality will come with time.

Tags: online tools

Many moons ago, I wrote about Google Presentations and Ulteo's online implementation of OpenOffice Impress, but I haven't had too much time to point out other web services since then. Of course, Preezo and Zoho Show are sitting in my bookmarks, waiting for evaluation, but I thought I'd take a moment to point out some other neat web applications that presenters might be interested in.

Online Photo Editing

Two websites really stand out in my mind under this category. Picnik and Photoshop Express.

Picnik


Picnik was the first online photo editor I was exposed to, and, to an extent, it's still my favorite. It has several editing tools and integrates with several photo hosting sites such as Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa – allowing you to browse photos uploaded to those sites without having to navigate away from Picnik. You can also upload photos stored on your computer.

From Picnik, you can add text (with many font options), shapes, and numerous effects to your photos. There is a $25/year subscription if you want even more feautres, but the free account should suffice for most. The only thing I hold against Picnik are the ads that clutter the screen in a free account.

Photoshop Express


While not quite as feature-packed as Picnik, Photoshop Express offers a much smoother, ad-free interface for working. Like Picnik, it integrates with popular image hosting sites, and it allows users to show off photographs in galleries. The experience of using Photoshop Express is very pleasant, and I could see this supplanting Picnik as my online tool of choice with the addition of a few more filters.

The only major concern right now is limited image format support.

Document Sharing

I've referred to Scribd as YouTube for documents, and I still can't think of a better way to describe it.



Scribd lets you share documents (and slides) online through a Flash-based PDF viewer, allowing for tags, comments, and even embedding. It's simple to use and of clear benefit to presenters wanting to share their handouts as broadly and easily as possible.

Slide Sharing

A couple new services have recently come to my attention that allow for slide creation and sharing over the Internet, ShowBeyond and SlideRocket.

ShowBeyond


ShowBeyond is an easy-to-use site that allows you to upload images and audio to create a small slidecast. You are limited to 24 slides, which seems a reasonable limitation, but the toolset seems more appropriate for the trip-to-Florida type slideshow over an actual presentation. Still, it's a good site for creating simple presentations or photo slides.

SlideRocket


SlideRocket is currently in private beta, and I haven't been accepted (yet) to try it out. Regardless, the site's tour makes SlideRocket look like a serious contender in the arena of web presentations (just so long as they don't cripple free accounts too much). This could turn out to be a very impressive product, and I'm excited to give it a spin.

Just take a look at this demonstration:


I'm sure there are many more fun and exciting web applications I either haven't discovered yet or just haven't had time to explore, but these should keep you busy for a while. Be sure to let me know of any online tools you use and want me to know about!

Tags: software, online tools

So this is a little later than promised, but I doubt any of you mind. I hope everyone has had a nice week of holidays and family gatherings – if not this last week, then recently.

Anyway, I've been spending some time with the online incarnation of OpenOffice as served by Ulteo. Oversimplifying the process, because OpenOffice relies heavily on Java for much of its functionality and because Java can be run within a browser window, it is therefore possible to run OpenOffice in its entirety in a browser. It's an interesting and surprisingly competent implementation of the productivity suite, but I can't say I'm ready for it to replace my desktop tools at this point.

To use OpenOffice online, you have to create an account with Ulteo, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with using online applications. Once you login to your account, a launch interface appears with some general settings.


do they really need to check these settings every time?

The weird thing is that even though I chose English on this screen as my primary language, I had to remind the spell checker of this fact later. Hopefully that was just a bug that will soon be smoothed over. This launch page would be fine if it didn't load so slowly. The hang-up seems to be with an unsigned certificate, and this affected each browser I tested (IE 7, Camino, and Safari).

Once past the launch screen, a document wizard appears if you launch Impress. (Writer mercifully opens straight into a blank document.) The Presentation WIzard is pretty much the same as that found in OpenOffice, and you can select to never have it bother you again – though I've experienced it forgetting this setting occasionally.


a wizard, of course

Once past the wizard, OpenOffice online sports a surprisingly complete interface for designing and delivering presentations – complete with menus, toolbars, slide organizer, and task pane. I recommend that you leave everything exactly as it's laid out, though. I experienced some serious redraw issues when moving things around.


it looks just like the desktop version!

There are even separate interfaces for creating charts, graphs, and spreadsheets. The application features a full compliment of animations and transitions for text and slides, differentiating it from Google Presentations. There is also a deep set of preferences and support for keyboard commands. You can even use OpenOffice online to display your presentations, but, just like with the Google application, your slides will appear in a browser window that will not fill the screen.

The online OpenOffice features limited collaboration through screen sharing by invite (pictured below) but nothing comparable to the deeper collaboration tools provided by Google Apps.



Also, the online version of Impress supports all of the formats the desktop version does when it comes to saving, including .ppt and .pdf. This allows you to save a document in the format of your choice and download it to be viewed by a desktop application. Unfortunately, the file manager is pretty clunky compared to Google Apps, and my saved document did not appear until I signed out and then back in.

Other problems include generally slow performance and occasional visual bugs. The application also wants to customize your cursor for some strange reason, but the implementation behaves inconsistently. Finally, I ran into some issues retrieving my sample document. Opening it in the online version of Impress after saving it previously resulted in this mess:


attack of the green stars!

Saving the deck as a PowerPoint file and downloading it yielded only slightly better results. The background is noticeably different, and the graph is detected as an image, unable to be edited. On the other hand, PowerPoint retained all animations and transitions included in the original file. Results are similar if you open the PowerPoint file in Keynote.



All said, Ulteo's online OpenOffice project is quite impressive, but the flaws add up quickly. While none would probably be deal breakers by themselves, taken as a whole, they damage the usefulness of these online tools. In terms of features and depth, Ulteo is on to something here. If they can squash the numerous performance issues, streamline their own management interface some, beef up the collaboration features, and fine tune the reliability of this application, they may have a winner. Until then, Impress online is a fascinating novelty but no more.

For more, you may be interested in my own overview of NeoOffice Impress (a derivative work of OpenOffice Impress) that I posted earlier this year.

Tags: online tools, software

Here's a quick tidbit for those interested in online tools. A company called Ulteo has released an online version of OpenOffice. It requires a free registration to use, but what doesn't these days? Here's a shot of OpenOffice Impress in action.



The product is still in beta, but it shows some interesting potential. I have a very busy week ahead of me, so I'll try to put some first impressions together next weekend. Be sure to check back!

Tags: software, online tools

Recently, Google has added an online presentation application in addition to their word processing and spreadsheet applications. Google Presentations is an interesting experience in that it is capable of more than I expected, but, depending on the features you are looking for, it may still not do enough. I took some time testing Google Presentations in Camino (a Mac-specific Firefox derivation) to see how things work. Please note that Google does not fully support Safari at this time in its productivity tools. I had no problems using Safari, but your mileage may vary.

Basic Features

I've never used Google's online productivity tools before. I have certainly been aware of their existence, but I had never seen them in action. As a result, some of the features I cover may be familiar to users of Google Docs and Spreadsheets – such as the document manager.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how efficiently Google manages the documents created with their online apps. Managing your documents is very similar to managing an online email account, and opening a specific document takes you directly to the corresponding online application. In Camino, the document opens in a new tab, leaving the other documents easily accessible. I don't know what I was expecting when it came to document management, but this feature comes as a pleasant surprise.

Once in the presentation application, the abilities and the limitations are immediately visible. You can perform basic text editing on your slides including font, size, color, highlight, lists, and alignment, but I had no luck editing already formatted text. (This may not be the case in other browsers.) It seems you have to plan ahead when it comes to formatting, or be prepared to type a few things over. You can include hyperlinks in your presentation, which can be especially useful since the presentation will already be in a browser when displayed. It's also very easy to save your slides as well as duplicate and delete individual slides. In fact, I found the Duplicate command quite useful, but we'll revisit that in a few paragraphs.

When creating your presentation, Google offers a few basic slide layouts and themes. When you choose to insert a new slide, a dialog appears offering you the available templates. You'll notice none of the slides have placeholders for images, and this is because there is no clip art or word art available in Google Presentations. On the other hand, you can upload your own images for use in the presentation, negating this limitation. Image uploads can also be used for inserting charts and graphs if you export them as images or take screenshots of them.


A similar box appears if you want to choose a new theme. Here are some of the designs available for your presentations:



The themes are very reminiscent of PowerPoint, and those used to the Microsoft-designed themes of that program will feel right at home. However, those looking for something a little more refined will be left wanting. Shelly, Blank, and Gradient Black are the three best themes in my opinion, offering simple color schemes and minimal distraction.

Google Presentations will also directly import PowerPoint files, and the results look pretty decent. Text colors, slide designs, and text formatting remains entirely intact. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of Google Presentations, all text build and slide transitions are lost upon import. However, I was surprised to see that the slides are completely editable.


Garr Reynolds should be proud...

All of this leads up to the ability to share your presentations anywhere you have an internet connection. A published presentation will be assigned a unique URL you can send to others, or you can play the presentation directly from the Google application in a maximized browser window. Furthermore, you can share your presentations with others and collaborate on editing the slides – an especially welcome feature for those times you have to collaborate on a presentation, even if you only use Google Presentations to draft the slides before finalizing them in a dedicated application like Impress or Keynote.

The Limitations

I've already touched on some of this, but these tools are very basic. Don't expect to find automatic builds, slide animations, object paths, clip art, word art, or drawing tools here. If you create your presentation entirely within the Google app, you will be forced to keep things very simple – which might actually be a good thing. While others might bemoan the lack of eye candy in Google Presentations, I think such a Spartan feature set forces users to really think about content and how to present it meaningfully rather than impressively.

One of the only real issues I ran into was the lack of support for text builds. If you enter a list onto a slide, then the entire list will appear at once. This is where the Duplicate command comes in useful. To work around this limitation, I created a bullet-filled slide, then duplicated it several times. Next, I deleted the text I did not want on the slides leading up to the entire list, creating the illusion of text builds. This will greatly increase the physical size of your slide deck, but the difference should be transparent to viewers.


notice the expanding list in the slide sorter

The other major limitation comes from the nature of sharing over the internet. Depending on the connection, your slides may hesitate before loading. Also, some design backgrounds may look pixelated when scaled up to higher resolutions, and the browser window will always be present. This can be somewhat alleviated with browsers that feature full-screen modes.

Final Thoughts

One might be left wondering if it's possible to create attractive slides in Google Presentations at all, and that all depends on what you are looking for aesthetically. Simple can be beautiful, and Google Presentations epitomizes simplicity at this point. It's features are extremely basic, but it is functional and provides one more way to have access to your slides in various settings. It may not serve as a primary presentation package, but it excels at being a good backup or a convenient way of collaborating and drafting slides.

Let me conclude with one more screenshot and hint.

looking like Keynote

In this deck, each slide merely has an image placed upon it. I took a completed Keynote presentation, exported all of the slides (and builds) as individual images, and then uploaded each image onto its individual slide. Now I have a presentation that is accessible anywhere but still looks like it does when presented from my laptop. Again, thanks to the ability to upload images, you don't have to feel constrained by the limited editing tools provided by Google Presentations.

A few years ago, I would have never dreamed I'd be editing slides in a web browser. Google Presentations, while limited in many ways, is a great backup and collaboration tool, and it is serviceable as a composition application as well. The sparse feature set may be unsettling at first, but you might find yourself getting more work done without the many distractions of PowerPoint. Google Presentations is not a competitor to dedicated slide applications. Rather it is an augmentation to those programs, and it makes for a fine addition to the tool set of any presenter.

Other Perspectives

• Ars Technica: Hands On with Google Presentations
• Macworld: First Look: Google Presentations

Other Online Presentation Tools

I discovered these while researching this post and thought I would pass them on. Perhaps I will test these out as well.

• Zoho Show
• Preezo

Like Google, both of these services require you to sign up for a free account.

Tags: software, google, online tools